Kwon, Ki Beom is one of 21 outstanding artists selected by the Korean Artist Project. The Korean Artist Project is a global online website which aims to promote Korean contemporary artists hosted by the Ministy of Culture, Sports, and Tourism of Korea and organized by the Korean Art Museum Association. KAP has launched with a three-year plan spanning from 2011 to 2013. At the first step in 2011, art professionals and critics selected 21 artists, and curators from 13 private art museums organized their virtual solo exhibitions. KAP would love to introduce a diverse spectrum of Korean contemporary art to the global audience. Through these efforts, KAP will play a significant role in the promotion and development of Korean contemporary art. Also, the KAP will become a useful platform, which will serve as a stepping-stone to create cultural exchange and global networks with diverse art people. Please visit www.koreanartistproject.com

Critic’s Note: The Conceptual Substance of Nature, and the Inertia/Flow of Consciousness Kwon has passed beyond the phase where he could easily explain the condition of the world, and now finds himself faced with an explanatory method that is more chaotic, complex and multi-tiered. In general, there has been a continuum in Kwon’s work from the Glass Flower series(2004), to the Crash(2006) and Jumble Painting series(2007), and finally on to his most recent paintings titled, Ambiguity(2008-present). This string of themes not only reveals the distinct characteristics of each phase in the evolution of the artist’s work, but also allows us to reconstruct the conceptual and physiological phenomena that flow through the full spectrum of his projects. For example, Kwon contrasts glass with flora in the Glass Flower series. This comparison is then expanded and reproduced as a contrast between geometric and organic forms, artificiality and nature, the urban and natural environments, and civilization and nature. That is, he adopted the notion of conflicting polarities as a tool to understand and explain, reproduce and express the way the world exists. These contrasting binary concepts collide with one another in his subsequent project titled, Crash, and finally fuse into a whole in the Jumble Painting series. The term “jumble” conveys two competing meanings: reconciliation and chaos. The artist recognized that the differing connotations of the term in fact stem from the same root, and the term is also reference to the painter’s personal experience of conceptual chaos. The recognition of the fusion and chaos of contrasting essences, triggered in the Jumble Painting series, serves as actual nourishment for Kwon’s most recent project, the Ambiguity series. Distinct from his earlier works that were driven by a perception of contrasts, comparisons and division, his recent projects have been bulwarked by an awareness of chaos, fusion, and organic consilience. (This is an excerpt from an original text.)